Today’s MT digest highlights a field that is expanding beyond sentence-level translation toward richer, more grounded language understanding. Across these papers, a common thread is the use of broader context—visual, discourse, and interactional—to improve how systems interpret and generate meaning. Another emerging theme is a push for stronger reasoning and more interpretable structure, from latent semantic geometry to autonomous agents that can discover linguistic patterns with less human supervision.

ChemVLR: Prioritizing Reasoning in Perception for Chemical Vision-Language Understanding

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in chemical visual understanding, current models are predominantly optimized for direct visual question-answering tasks. This paradigm often results in "black-box" systems that fail to utilize the inherent capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer underlying reaction mechanisms. In this work, we introduce ChemVLR, a chemical VLM designed to prioritize reasoning within the perception process. Unlike conventional chemical VLMs, ChemVLR analyzes visual inputs in a fine-grained manner by explicitly identifying granular chemical descriptors, such as functional groups, prior to generating answers. This approach ensures the production of explicit and interpretable reasoning paths for complex visual chemical problems. To facilitate this methodology, we implement a cross-modality reverse-engineering strategy, combined with a rigorous filtering pipeline, to curate a large-scale reasoning-and-captioning dataset comprising 760k high-quality samples across molecular and reaction tasks. Furthermore, we adopt a three-stage training framework that systemically builds model perception and reasoning capacity. Experiments demonstrate that ChemVLR achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, surpassing both leading proprietary models and domain-specific open-source baselines. We also provide comprehensive ablation studies to validate our training strategy and data generation designs. Code and model weights will be available at https://github.com/xxlllz/ChemVLR.

Geometric Properties of the Voronoi Tessellation in Latent Semantic Manifolds of Large Language Models

Language models operate on discrete tokens but compute in continuous vector spaces, inducing a Voronoi tessellation over the representation manifold. We study this tessellation empirically on Qwen3.5-4B-Base, making two contributions. First, using float32 margin recomputation to resolve bfloat16 quantization artifacts, we validate Mabrok's (2026) linear scaling law of the expressibility gap with $R^2$ = 0.9997 - the strongest confirmation to date - and identify a mid-layer geometric ambiguity regime where margin geometry is anti-correlated with cross-entropy (layers 24-28, $ρ$ = -0.29) before crystallizing into alignment at the final layer ($ρ$ = 0.836). Second, we show that the Voronoi tessellation of a converged model is reshapable through margin refinement procedures (MRP): short post-hoc optimization runs that widen token-decision margins without retraining. We compare direct margin maximization against Fisher information distance maximization across a dose-response sweep. Both methods find the same ceiling of ~16,300 correctable positions per 256K evaluated, but differ critically in collateral damage. Margin maximization damage escalates with intervention strength until corrections are overwhelmed. Fisher damage remains constant at ~5,300 positions across the validated range ($λ$ = 0.15-0.6), achieving +28% median margin improvement at $λ$ = 0.6 with invariant downstream benchmarks - a geometric reorganization that compresses the expressibility gap while preserving its scaling law. However, frequency and token-class audits reveal that gains concentrate in high-frequency structural tokens (84% of net corrections at $λ$ = 0.6), with content and entity-like contributions shrinking at higher $λ$. Fisher MRP is therefore a viable geometric polishing tool whose practical ceiling is set not by aggregate damage but by the uniformity of token-level benefit.

Agent-Driven Corpus Linguistics: A Framework for Autonomous Linguistic Discovery

Corpus linguistics has traditionally relied on human researchers to formulate hypotheses, construct queries, and interpret results - a process demanding specialized technical skills and considerable time. We propose Agent-Driven Corpus Linguistics, an approach in which a large language model (LLM), connected to a corpus query engine via a structured tool-use interface, takes over the investigative cycle: generating hypotheses, querying the corpus, interpreting results, and refining analysis across multiple rounds. The human researcher sets direction and evaluates final output. Unlike unconstrained LLM generation, every finding is anchored in verifiable corpus evidence. We treat this not as a replacement for the corpus-based/corpus-driven distinction but as a complementary dimension: it concerns who conducts the inquiry, not the epistemological relationship between theory and data. We demonstrate the framework by linking an LLM agent to a CQP-indexed Gutenberg corpus (5 million tokens) via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Given only "investigate English intensifiers," the agent identified a diachronic relay chain (so+ADJ > very > really), three pathways of semantic change (delexicalization, polarity fixation, metaphorical constraint), and register-sensitive distributions. A controlled baseline experiment shows that corpus grounding contributes quantification and falsifiability that the model cannot produce from training data alone. To test external validity, the agent replicated two published studies on the CLMET corpus (40 million tokens) - Claridge (2025) and De Smet (2013) - with close quantitative agreement. Agent-driven corpus research can thus produce empirically grounded findings at machine speed, lowering the technical barrier for a broader range of researchers.

Video-guided Machine Translation with Global Video Context

Video-guided Multimodal Translation (VMT) has advanced significantly in recent years. However, most existing methods rely on locally aligned video segments paired one-to-one with subtitles, limiting their ability to capture global narrative context across multiple segments in long videos. To overcome this limitation, we propose a globally video-guided multimodal translation framework that leverages a pretrained semantic encoder and vector database-based subtitle retrieval to construct a context set of video segments closely related to the target subtitle semantics. An attention mechanism is employed to focus on highly relevant visual content, while preserving the remaining video features to retain broader contextual information. Furthermore, we design a region-aware cross-modal attention mechanism to enhance semantic alignment during translation. Experiments on a large-scale documentary translation dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baseline models, highlighting its effectiveness in long-video scenarios.

Discourse Coherence and Response-Guided Context Rewriting for Multi-Party Dialogue Generation

Previous research on multi-party dialogue generation has predominantly leveraged structural information inherent in dialogues to directly inform the generation process. However, the prevalence of colloquial expressions and incomplete utterances in dialogues often impedes comprehension and weakens the fidelity of dialogue structure representations, which is particularly pronounced in multi-party dialogues. In this work, we propose a novel framework DRCR (Discourse coherence and Response-guided Context Rewriting) to improve multi-party dialogue generation through dialogue context rewriting. Specifically, DRCR employs two complementary feedback signals, discourse coherence and response quality, to construct preference data for both context rewriting and response generation. Moreover, we propose a dynamic self-evolution learning method that allows the rewriter and responder to continuously enhance their capabilities through mutual interaction in an iterative training loop. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four multi-party dialogue datasets substantiate the effectiveness of DRCR.